JoeHostile wrote:Ok thanks guys. Sorry Canadiananter, but if I don't have to sacrifice a colony I'm definitely going to give it a go. And batspiderfish I did read it but I didn't scroll down past your "Subgenus Acanthomyops" description, so I missed all the most important stuff lol. But now great how perfect you wrote everything I need right there!

Thanks for your input! I should probably do like a table of contents or something.

JoeHostile wrote:Oh gee not sure what to do. I need to find more information. I'm not interested in sacrificing a colony... weird thing is about an hour ago I saw a lasius neoniger queen walking around. I didn't take her because I already have a neoniger colony. But either way I guess I would have had to sacrifice my existing lasius colony because this parasitic ant needs an already established colony? I'm wondering what if I just take some workers, some broad in various stages and make a queenless colony to trick this parasitic queen?

I'll try to take some better pictures. But this queen is particularly uncooperative plus with her wings on she is driving me nuts lol.

You don't know how fustrating reading this is. You can never catch too many queens in my opinion

Ya I get capturing every queen you see if you're trying to start a colony. But I don't want double colonies of the same species. And Id rather just let a queen be rather than capture queens just for the sake of capturing them.

Batspiderfish you should include how you have to wait for spring to try and introduce this queen into a colony. I don't think I saw that anywhere.

I also don't really understand the point of this queen being parasitic. I could understand if maybe this queen can't store enough energy to be able to survive the amount of time it takes for her to produce her own nanantics that can then feed her. But this queen survives until spring without any workers feeding her. Plus she semi clusteral? So she can get her own food. So I'm guessing she can't care for eggs, larvee or worker ants? What does she do all day? Lol

JoeHostile wrote:Ya I get capturing every queen you see if you're trying to start a colony. But I don't want double colonies of the same species. And Id rather just let a queen be rather than capture queens just for the sake of capturing them.

Batspiderfish you should include how you have to wait for spring to try and introduce this queen into a colony. I don't think I saw that anywhere.

I also don't really understand the point of this queen being parasitic. I could understand if maybe this queen can't store enough energy to be able to survive the amount of time it takes for her to produce her own nanantics that can then feed her. But this queen survives until spring without any workers feeding her. Plus she semi clusteral? So she can get her own food. So I'm guessing she can't care for eggs, larvee or worker ants? What does she do all day? Lol

You don't have to wait until spring to introduce a social parasite to workers.

Social parasites are not semi-claustral. While it may not make sense to us humans why ants which seem physically capable of starting their own colonies have lost the ability to care for brood, the proliferation and diversity of social parasites (especially in Lasius and Formica) proves that their strategy is very effective. The main draw of social parasitism, it would seem, is the colony's ability to produce and sustain many more queens than would otherwise be possible if they were packaged with nutrition to start their own nests. Rather than competing with other foragers, social parasites seem to have the luxury of replacing/becoming one of their would-be competitors.

Well now I'm a bit confused. I thought these ants over winter and then invade a colony in the spring? They're not semi clastaural but they must eat something between now and the 7 months it's going to take to get to spring or then they are born with enough nutrients to last 7 months only. Maybe that's why it's a parasite because maybe that's the max it can last for then it needs to be fed immediately by a host colony before it can lay its own eggs.

And I don't have to wait till spring because of course I could just drop the queen into a colony?
Seems like this is almost impossible to make work in the best of conditions. I want to have the best chance at making this work. So if these ants wait till spring to invade a nest I don't think I want to try and do it right before winter?

Nothing in my guide says that you drop the queen into a colony. Doing that has a very low chance of success. Use only callow workers (which may be hard to find at this time of year, true) or the youngest workers available, which come from inside a nest.

Lasius claviger CAN overwinter before finding a nest, but they will infiltrate a colony if they happen to find one before then. Some hypothesize that, during infiltration, they use cold temperatures to their advantage, as their metabolic rate seems to be better than that of their host species under those conditions.

If you don't have what you need to make the host introduction work, you can obviously hibernate her until you do, just make sure to offer her food, because these queens seem to die in captivity unless they can eat periodically. Nobody really knows if/how they get food when they hibernate in the wild.